What makes the South Caucasus a region

The range, and the country that does not touch it

The Greater Caucasus runs between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and the border that Georgia and Azerbaijan each keep with Russia follows its crest. Shkhara stands on that watershed at the northern edge of Georgia, 5,193 metres, and Bazardüzü stands on it at the northern edge of Azerbaijan, 4,466 metres. Armenia's ground belongs to another system, the volcanic plateau of the Armenian Highland, and Aragats at 4,090 metres is one of its cones. Armenia is accordingly the member with no Russian border. Iran runs the other way, bordering Armenia and Azerbaijan and not Georgia. Turkey borders all of them, though its frontier with Azerbaijan is only the stretch held by Nakhchivan, an exclave cut off from the rest of the country by Armenian territory since the Treaty of Kars of 13 October 1921 placed it under Azerbaijani auspices.

Transcaucasia, and which way the name faces

The older English name for this ground, Transcaucasia, translates the Russian Zakavkazye, meaning beyond the Caucasus, and the vantage it is beyond the mountains from is the one to the north. South Caucasus, in general English use since 1991, describes the same ground from inside it. Neither name settles the other question, which is which continent the ground belongs to. The M49 standard published by the UN Statistics Division files all of them under Western Asia and states that its groupings carry no political meaning; this catalogue files them under Europe, and each of them was admitted to the Council of Europe, Georgia on 27 April 1999 and the other two on 25 January 2001.

What the states date from

The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic was declared on 22 April 1918 and lasted about five weeks. Georgia left it on 26 May 1918, and Armenia and Azerbaijan declared separately two days after that. Soviet rule then arrived in the reverse order: Baku on 28 April 1920, Yerevan on 29 November 1920, Tbilisi on 25 February 1921. The republics were joined up again as the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, which signed the union treaty of 30 December 1922 as one of four founding parties and was broken back into separate union republics by the Soviet constitution of 5 December 1936.

The second independence came in separate acts rather than one. Georgia held a referendum on 31 March 1991 and its parliament passed an act of restoration on 9 April. Armenia held its referendum on 21 September 1991 and declared two days later. Azerbaijan adopted a constitutional act on state independence on 18 October 1991. Georgia is also the member that afterwards left the Commonwealth of Independent States, notifying the withdrawal on 18 August 2008 and completing it a year later to the day.

Languages that are not related to each other

Georgian is Kartvelian, a family with no members outside the Caucasus. Armenian is its own branch of Indo-European. Azerbaijani is Turkic. Each is written in a different alphabet, and none of the alphabets is shared with a neighbour: Mkhedruli, one of the three writing systems of the Georgian script that UNESCO inscribed in 2016; the Armenian script, traditionally dated to about 405; and the Latin alphabet, which Azerbaijani returned to under a law of 25 December 1991, after a century that had also written it in Arabic script and in Cyrillic.

The routes that run, and the borders that do not

Three works of infrastructure cross Azerbaijan into Georgia and on into Turkey, and none of them touches Armenia. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline loaded its first tanker at Ceyhan on 4 June 2006 and was opened formally on 13 July 2006. The South Caucasus gas pipeline follows the same corridor. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway opened on 30 October 2017. The routing follows two closed frontiers: Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993, and the Armenian and Azerbaijani border has been closed since the fighting of the early 1990s, which leaves Georgia carrying what moves between the two.

Where the edges are argued

Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous oblast inside the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, and it has been the subject of a claim, a war from 1988, a ceasefire agreed at Bishkek on 5 May 1994, renewed fighting from 27 September to 10 November 2020, and a further Azerbaijani operation in September 2023. Both governments have taken the other to the International Court of Justice under the convention on racial discrimination: Armenia instituted proceedings on 16 September 2021, Azerbaijan on 23 September 2021. The catalogue records the two cases and settles neither.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been administered outside the reach of the government in Tbilisi since the wars that followed the Soviet collapse. Russia recognised both as states on 26 August 2008, most other governments have not, and the Georgian parliament passed a law on occupied territories on 23 October 2008. None of the three has a record of its own in this catalogue.

The border that is being drawn rather than argued runs north of all of it. On 15 May 2024 the two state commissions agreed a protocol describing the sections of the Armenian and Azerbaijani border at four villages, the first stretch delimited since 1991, and took as their reference the line that had run between the Soviet republics at the moment the union dissolved. The internal boundary of a state that no longer exists is what the present border is measured against.